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Life History Strategies’ Exist? Rebecca Sear

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Life History Strategies’ Exist? Rebecca Sear Do human ‘life history strategies’ exist? Rebecca Sear London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Part of the Evolution & Human Behaviour Special Issue on ‘Current Debates in Life History Research’ edited by Willem Frankenhuis and Daniel Nettle doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.09.004 Abstract Interest in incorporating life history research from evolutionary biology into the human sciences has grown rapidly in recent years. Two core features of this research have the potential to prove valuable in strengthening theoretical frameworks in the health and social sciences: the idea that there is a fundamental trade-off between reproduction and health; and that environmental influences are important in determining how life histories develop. However, the literature on human life histories has increasingly travelled away from its origins in biology, and become conceptually diverse. For example, there are differences of opinion between evolutionary researchers about the extent to which behavioural traits associate with life history traits to form ‘life history strategies’. Here, I review the different approaches to human life histories from evolutionary anthropologists, developmental psychologists and personality psychologists, in order to assess the evidence for human ‘life history strategies’. While there is precedent in biology for the argument that some behavioural traits, notably risk-taking behaviour, may be linked in predictable ways with life history traits, there is little theoretical or empirical justification for including a very wide range of behavioural traits in a ‘life history strategy’. Given the potential of life history approaches to provide a powerful theoretical framework for understanding human health and behaviour, I then recommend productive ways forward for the field: 1) greater focus on the life history trade-offs which underlie proposed strategies; 2) greater precision when using the language of life history theory and life history strategies; 3) collecting more empirical data, from a diverse range of populations, on linkages between life history traits, behavioural traits and the environment, including the underlying mechanisms which generate these linkages; and 4) greater integration with the social and health sciences. Key words: Life history research, fast-slow continuum, reproduction, survival, trade-offs, risk-taking behaviour, environment 1 Introduction What is life history theory? In evolutionary biology, love doesn’t so much hurt as kill: at the heart of life history research lies the assumption of a trade-off between reproduction and survival (Fisher, 1930; Roff, 1992; Stearns, 1992). Individuals are not ‘Darwinian demons’ able to devote unlimited energy to maximising both reproduction and survival at once (Law, 1979), but must make decisions about how best to allocate the limited resources they have access to. Those who invest heavily in reproduction will have fewer resources to spend on maintaining their own health and wellbeing, and so will have shorter lifespans. Life history research is also about time. It’s concerned with how individuals solve the problem of allocating their energetic resources over their entire lifetimes. A slightly different way of formulating the trade-off between reproduction and survival is to frame it as a trade-off between current and future reproduction. Investing heavily in reproduction right now will involve costs, including the depletion of resources, meaning that fewer resources will be available for reproduction in the future (and the most extreme cost will be death, which definitely curtails reproduction). ‘Life history theory’ is a body of research in evolutionary biology focusing on how energy is allocated across the life course between the life history traits of growth, survival and reproduction, and how these are timed across the lifespan; incorporating research on growth rate, age at reproductive maturity, reproductive rate, number of offspring and age at death (Charnov, 1993; Roff, 1992; Stearns, 1989, 1992). This field is anchored in the assumption that there will be trade-offs between these traits, such as between reproduction and survival, current and future reproduction, and also between growth and reproduction. How features of the environment influence life histories is also a fundamental part of this research programme (Roff, 2002; Stearns, 2000). ‘Life history theory’ in the evolutionary social sciences The above description, however, may not sound familiar to some evolutionary social scientists, or at least sound incomplete. In some areas of evolutionary psychology, ‘life history theory’ is now used synonymously with the idea of ‘life history strategies’. This research is inspired by work in evolutionary biology which observed that species can be lined up along a continuum of life history strategies, from ‘fast’ life history strategists who prioritise current reproduction over future reproduction, to ‘slow’ life history strategists, who invest more in growth and maintaining health (Promislow & Harvey, 1990). Fast life history strategists grow quickly, reproduce early and often, but at the cost of rapid senescence and early death (think of the mouse). Slow life history strategists grow slowly, reproduce late and rarely, and die at old ages (think of the elephant). This ‘fast-slow’ concept has been transferred from explaining differences between species to explaining differences between individuals in the evolutionary social sciences. In some versions of this approach, the concept of a ‘life history strategy’ has also been expanded to include several behavioural and psychological traits (B. J. Ellis, Figueredo, Brumbach, & Schlomer, 2009). As life history research has been incorporated into the evolutionary social sciences, a number of conceptual differences have arisen between ‘life history’ research programmes in evolutionary biology and the evolutionary social sciences (Nettle & Frankenhuis, 2020). In a recent bibliographic analysis of life history research, Nettle and Frankenhuis (2019) demonstrated that LHT-E (their term for research using life history theory in evolutionary biology) and LHT-P (life history research in psychology) largely operate independently of one another, in that citations within these two literatures rarely overlap. The terminology used within each literature, however, is that of ‘life 2 history theory’: the use of the same terminology to refer to conceptually different research programmes has created a lot of confusion. To add to the confusion, the use of life history theory in the evolutionary social sciences is far from uniform; while some researchers work exclusively within the LHT-P paradigm, others draw more heavily on LHT-E to inform their work. This paper aims to clear up some of this confusion in the literature on human life histories, by providing an overview of the different strands of this research in the evolutionary social sciences, with a particular focus on discussing the evidence for whether ‘life history strategies’ exist. Work on human life histories cannot be discussed without first a brief outline of some important take-home messages from LHT-E. A brief historical overview of some important aspects of LHT-E An important component of LHT-E involves investigation of how features of the environment affect life history traits and trade-offs. At the species level, environmental variation results in genotypes being shaped by natural selection, so that life histories become adapted to environmental conditions. At the individual level, environmental variation is assumed to affect life history traits through ‘phenotypic plasticity’: individuals can respond to environmental cues to shift their life histories adaptively. In other words, the same genotype can produce different phenotypes, or observable characteristics (Stearns & Koella, 1986; West-Eberhard, 2003). For example, age at puberty is influenced by access to good nutrition in childhood, and is earlier for well-nourished individuals (Kuzawa & Bragg, 2012). Note that this ability of a life history trait to respond adaptively to the environment is an evolved characteristic, even if the exact life history outcome for a particular individual is determined by environmental factors. The earliest work on life history strategies suggested that unpredictable environments, in which mortality was ‘density-independent’, should favour species which exhibit a cluster of traits which result in rapid population growth (Pianka (1970), building on work by MacArthur and Wilson (1967) and Dobzhansky (1950)). Pianka suggested that an ‘r-selected’ strategy (using MacArthur & Wilson’s r/K terminology) should involve many of the features of what became known as a ‘fast life history strategy’, in that reproduction happens early and often. In more stable environments where mortality was density-dependent and environments are saturated (i.e. cannot support rapid population growth) then ‘K-selected’ species are favoured, which exhibit traits characteristic of a slow life history strategy. Population density and environmental saturation subsequently lost importance as environmental features which exerted selection pressures on species’ life history strategies; instead, it was proposed that mortality risk in the environment could explain variation in life histories (Promislow & Harvey, 1990). In environments with high extrinsic mortality risk – where extrinsic mortality is defined as that beyond an individual’s control – it was proposed that the best strategy is to grow
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